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Snotnose writes:

Dr. John Plunkett died this week. He spent nearly 20 years arguing in court against bad forensic science, for which he was maliciously prosecuted and received false ethics complaints. Through his efforts, 300 innocent people were exonerated. (This sentence from fark.com)

Like a lot of other doctors, child welfare advocates and forensic specialists, John Plunkett at first bought into the theory of Shaken Baby Syndrome (SBS). It's a convenient diagnosis for prosecutors, in that it provides a cause of death (violent shaking), a culprit (whoever was last with the child before death) and even intent (prosecutors often argue that the violent, extended shaking establishes mens rea.) But in the late 1990s, Plunkett — a forensic pathologist in Minnesota — began to have doubts about the diagnosis. The same year his study was published, Plunkett testified in the trial of Lisa Stickney, a licensed day care worker in Oregon. Thanks in large part to Plunkett's testimony, Stickney was acquitted. District Attorney Michael Dugan responded with something unprecedented — it criminally charged an expert witness over testimony he had given in court. Today, the scientific consensus on SBS has since shifted significantly in Plunkett's direction.

[...] According to the National Registry of Exonerations, 16 SBS convictions have been overturned. Plunkett's obituary puts the figure at 300, and claims that he participated in 50 of those cases. I'm not sure of the source for that figure, and it's the first I've seen of it. But whatever the number, Plunkett deserves credit for being among the first to sound the alarm about wrongful SBS convictions. His study was the first step toward those exonerations.

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for fyngyrz

Senator Kennedy of Louisiana confronted Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg about the transparency of the social media company's policies on Tuesday.

[...]

"I'm going to suggest you go home and rewrite it, and tell your $1,200 dollar and[sic] hour lawyer...you want it written in English not Swahili, so the average American user can understand," Kennedy said.

Source:
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/10/senator-to-zuckerberg-your-user-agreement-sucks.html

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Amid much excitement in 2016, astronomers revealed the discovery of an Earth-sized planet around the star closest to our Sun, Proxima Centauri. This exoplanet, just 4.2 light years from Earth, was close enough to its red dwarf star that water might well exist on its surface.

Alas, now we know that life probably does not live on the planet, at least not on the surface. In March 2016, astronomers using an array of telescopes known as Evryscope observed a "superflare" 10 times larger than any previous one detected from the red dwarf star.

The arXiv. Abstract number: 1804.02001 (About the arXiv). Submitted to AAS Journals.

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

The Washington Post has a retrospective on 14 years of Mark Zuckerberg saying sorry, not sorry:

From the moment the Facebook founder entered the public eye in 2003 for creating a Harvard student hot-or-not rating site, he's been apologizing. So we collected this abbreviated history of his public mea culpas.

See also:
Why Zuckerberg's 14-Year Apology Tour Hasn't Fixed Facebook.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

A sex worker review website has blocked U.S. users in anticipation of the Stop Enabling Sex-Trafficking Act (SESTA) coming into effect. U.S.-based users can still access it with a VPN, while all visitors are asked to "not access TER from a Prohibited Country":

A website that hosts customer reviews of sex workers has started blocking Internet users in the United States because of forthcoming changes in US law. Congress recently passed the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act bill (SESTA), and President Trump is expected to sign it into law. SESTA will make it easier to prosecute websites that host third-party content that promotes or facilitates prostitution, even in cases when the sex workers aren't victims of trafficking.

After Congress approved the bill, Craigslist removed its "Personals" section and Reddit removed some sex-related subreddits. The Erotic Review (TER) has followed suit by blocking any user who appears to be visiting the website from the United States. "As a result of this new law, TER has made the difficult decision to block access to the website from the United States until such time as the courts have enjoined enforcement of the law, the law has been repealed or amended, or TER has found a way to sufficiently address any legal concerns created by the new law," the website's home page says in a notice to anyone who accesses the site from a US location.

[...] SESTA was inspired largely by the existence of Backpage. But federal law enforcement authorities were able to shut Backpage down last week, even though SESTA hasn't been signed into law yet. Trump may sign the bill this week. [...] Some sex workers have spoken out against SESTA, saying that websites can help sex workers screen clients and avoid dangerous situations. A group called Survivors Against SESTA says the new law "will cause harm to vulnerable populations engaging in the sex trade without helping trafficking victims."

Previously: U.S. Congress Passes SESTA/FOSTA Law
Craigslist Removes Personals Sections in the U.S.
FBI Seizes backpage.com and Affiliates

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

Fuze card is wide open to data theft over Bluetooth. A fix is on the way.

The makers of the programmable Fuze smart card say it's powerful enough to be your wallet in one card yet secure enough to be used the same way as traditional payment cards—including trusting it to restaurant servers when paying the bill. But it turns out that convenience comes with a major catch. A flaw makes it possible for anyone with even brief physical control of the card to surreptitiously siphon all data stored on the device.

Fuze representatives said they're aware of the vulnerability and plan to fix it in an update scheduled for April 19. They also thanked the two researchers who, independent of one another, discovered the vulnerability and privately reported it. So far, however, Fuze officials have yet to fully inform users of the extent of the risk so they can prevent private data stored on the cards from being stolen or tampered with until the critical flaw is repaired.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The admins among you will be unsurprised to discover that, more than a quarter of the time, data breaches across the world originated between the chair and the keyboard of organisation "insiders". And no, we don't mean they clicked on a dodgy link...

The latest edition of Verizon's Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) found that 25 per cent of all attacks over the year were perpetrated by said insiders and were driven largely by financial gain, espionage and simple mistakes or misuse.

It also reports that organised criminal groups continue to be behind around half of all breaches, while state-affiliated groups were involved in more than one in 10. Financial gain, unsurprisingly, continued to be the top motivation for cybercriminals.

The healthcare industry was found to be at particularly high risk of insider threats through errors and employee misuse – such as medical workers accessing patient records for simple curiosity or fun.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The Domain Name System (DNS) is a plain-text service that lets anyone who can see “the wire” capture a user's DNS traffic and work out whether they're asking for naughty.com or nice.com. So to help enhance its privacy a group of researchers has proposed a more "Oblivious DNS” protocol.

However, as the group explained here, even encrypted DNS (for example, DNS over TLS) is still exposed at the recursive resolver (that is, the DNS component most directly connected to the client), because that server decrypts the user request so it can fetch the IP address of the site the user wants.

In other words, whether you use your ISP's resolver, or one provided by a third party like Google or Cloudflare, at some point you have to trust the resolver with your DNS requests.

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd

A new device allows robots used in warehouses and third-party logistics (3PL) facilities to draw power or recharge batteries wirelessly while in operation.

The technology could have a big impact on the capabilities of mobile industrial robots, potentially freeing them from limitations imposed by modern batteries.

Waypoint Robotics, which makes custom mobile robots for the supply chain industry, unveiled its EnZone Wireless Charging Dock at this year's MODEX, the largest supply chain expo in North & South America and the hottest ticket in town this week for the mobile robotics industry.

The underlying technology for the wireless charging system comes from partner WiBotic, which makes plug-and-play devices for the wireless transmission of power to robotic platforms.

Last year, WiBotic made a splash with a wireless charging pad it claims can keep drones in the air indefinitely. That capability could prove indispensable if drone delivery takes off the way many analysts believe it will.

Source: https://www.zdnet.com/article/untethered-wireless-power-transmission-will-make-robots-hard-to-stop/

Original Submission

sophiewilson0191 writes:

Imagine the neural network (NN) as a black box inside a space with internal functions, inputs, and outputs. All its outputs are dependent on the inputs with a unique idea: auto-training.

Inside the software, every possible function points in the direction of the existence of the network. As for its intelligence, it's undeterminable, an open question. But the human brain, whose intelligence is very high, can be investigated for patterns.

[...] Using an innovative artificial intelligence tool, the NN learns how to generate contextually relevant reviews. For example, if we ask for the best food around us, the system will answer. But the language will include various adjectives, which are not consistent with our way of talking.

If we use every single input available for a valuable result, then high performance could be obtained.

The network's perception of the interaction with our world has its own way of existence. If the machine remembers pleasant emotions of a man drinking his coffee, it can store those feelings in relation to the activity.

It is, now, possible, to see more clearly how this form of artificial intelligence builds consciousness. The NN can gradually build egos and make judgments by itself, from the stimuli it receives.

The NN is not programmed to obey the rules of the language's syntax. That is why it is so different - the complexity of a robot's mind, without any rules.

https://www.evolving-science.com/information-communication/understanding-basics-artificial-neural-network-00618

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Spring is the time of year when birds are singing throughout the Northern Hemisphere. Far to the north, beneath the ice, another lesser-known concert season in the natural world is just coming to an end.

A University of Washington study has published the largest set of recordings for bowhead whales, to discover that these marine mammals have a surprisingly diverse, constantly shifting vocal repertoire. The study published April 4 in Biology Letters, a journal of the United Kingdom's Royal Society, analyzed audio recordings gathered year-round east of Greenland. This population of bowhead whales was hunted almost to extinction in the 1600s and was recently estimated at about 200 animals. Audio recordings gathered from 2010 to 2014 indicate a healthy population, and include 184 different songs.

"If humpback whale song is like classical music, bowheads are jazz," said lead author Kate Stafford, an oceanographer at the UW's Applied Physics Laboratory. "The sound is more freeform. And when we looked through four winters of acoustic data, not only were there never any song types repeated between years, but each season had a new set of songs."

Stafford has recorded whales' sounds throughout the world's oceans as a way to track and study marine mammals. She first detected bowhead whales singing off the other side of Greenland in 2007. A previous study by Stafford of the Spitsbergen whales off west Greenland reported in 2012 that the whales were singing continuously during the winter breeding season, the first hint that there may be a healthy population in that area.

"We were hoping when we put the hydrophone out that we might hear a few sounds," Stafford said of the earlier study. "When we heard, it was astonishing: Bowhead whales were singing loudly, 24 hours a day, from November until April. And they were singing many, many different songs."

The new paper extends that initial five-month dataset, and confirms that bowhead whales sing in this region regularly from late fall to early spring. In fact the hydrophones, which are underwater microphones, picked up slightly more singing in the later years of the study. But what was most remarkable was the relentless variety in the animals' songs, or distinct musical phrases.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

For years, archaeologist Huw Groucutt and his team had driven one particular stretch of desert on their way to dig sites in Saudi Arabia. As they drove they caught glimpses of what looked like bones, emerging from the slowly eroding sand. Finally, in 2014, the team decided to explore the array of bones at Al Wusta. Within two years, amidst more than 800 fossilized animal bones and nearly 400 stone artifacts, they discovered something remarkable: the middle digit of a finger bone, from what appeared to be a modern human.

Anatomically modern, that is. The fossilized finger dated to at least 85,000 years ago.

[...] The discovery is “a dream come true, because it supports arguments that our teams have been making for more than 10 years,” said archaeologist Michael Petraglia, another co-author of the study, in a press conference. “This find together with other finds in the last few years suggests that modern humans, Homo sapiens, are moving out of Africa multiple times during many windows of opportunity in the last 100,000 years or so.”

takyon writes:

Senators Diane Feinstein (D-CA) and Chuck Grassley (R-IA) are preparing legislation that would regulate encryption and potentially mandate "backdoors." The Senate Judiciary Committee has been meeting with tech lobbyists and at least three researchers to come up with a "secure way" to allow only law enforcement to access encrypted information:

US lawmakers are yet again trying to force backdoors into tech products, allowing Uncle Sam, and anyone else with the necessary skills, to rifle through people's private encrypted information. Two years after her effort to introduce new legislation died, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) is again spearheading an effort to make it possible for law enforcement to access any information sent or stored electronically. Such a backdoor could be exploited by skilled miscreants to also read people's files and communications, crypto-experts continue to warn.

Tech lobbyists this month met the Senate Judiciary Committee to discuss the proposed legislation – a sign that politicians have changed tactics since trying, and failing, to force through new laws back in 2016. New York District Attorney and backdoor advocate Cyrus Vance (D-NY) also briefed the same committee late last month about why he felt new legislation was necessary. Vance has been arguing for fresh anti-encryption laws for several years, even producing a 42-page report back in November 2015 that walked through how the inability to trawl through people's personal communications was making his job harder.

Tech lobbyists and Congressional staffers have been leaking details of the meetings to, among others, Politico and the New York Times.

From the NYT article:

A National Academy of Sciences committee completed an 18-month study of the encryption debate, publishing a report last month. While it largely described challenges to solving the problem, one section cited presentations by several technologists who are developing potential approaches. They included Ray Ozzie, a former chief software architect at Microsoft; Stefan Savage, a computer science professor at the University of California, San Diego; and Ernie Brickell, a former chief security officer at Intel.

[...] The researchers, Mr. Ozzie said, recognized that "this issue is not going away," and were trying to foster "constructive dialogue" rather than declaring that no solution is possible.

Also at The Hill.

Previously: New Paper on The Risks of "Responsible Encryption"
Report On Device Encryption Suggests A Few Ways Forward For Law Enforcement
Senator Wyden Calls on Digital Rights Activists to Block Legislative Efforts to Weaken Encryption

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Banning Chinese network gear is a really bad idea, small ISPs tell FCC

The Federal Communications Commission's proposed ban on Huawei and ZTE gear in government-funded projects will hurt small Internet providers' efforts to deploy broadband, according to a lobby group for rural ISPs.

As previously reported, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai's proposal would prevent Universal Service Fund (USF) money from being used to buy equipment or services from companies that "pos[e] a national security risk." If the FCC approves the proposal, the ban is most likely to prevent the purchase of equipment from Chinese technology vendors Huawei and ZTE. But it could also affect other companies and technology from other countries, depending on how the FCC determines which companies pose national security threats.

ISPs who use federal money to build or expand broadband service would end up with fewer options for buying network gear. This would "irreparably damage broadband networks (and limit future deployment) in many rural and remote areas throughout the country," the Rural Wireless Association (RWA) told the FCC in a filing yesterday.

The RWA represents rural wireless Internet providers that offer home or mobile Internet service and have fewer than 100,000 subscribers. A recent Wall Street Journal report said that small ISPs rely on Huawei gear more than large telcos do.

Previously: U.S. Lawmakers Urge AT&T to Cut Ties With Huawei
U.S. Government Reportedly Wants to Build a 5G Network to Thwart Chinese Spying
U.S. Intelligence Agency Heads Warn Against Using Huawei and ZTE Products
The U.S. Intelligence Community's Demonization of Huawei Remains Highly Hypocritical

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/04/09/cens-a09.html

Zuckerberg announced Friday that the company will "require people who manage large pages to be verified," meaning they will have to provide the company, and by extension the US government, with their real names and locations.

[...] Zuckerberg added that the move would involve the hiring of thousands of additional censors and "security" personnel. "In order to require verification for all of these pages and advertisers, we will hire thousands of more people," he wrote.

Original Submission